Solid Majority of Texans Favor Legalizing Marijuana In New Survey

By |October 9, 2013

Nearly 60 percent of Texas voters favor making marijuana legal for adults and regulating it like alcohol, reports the Grits for Breakfast blog, quoting a Marijuana Policy Project survey. Only 38 percent were opposed. Texans are more supportie of regulating marijuana like alcohol than was the nation as a whole in a Pew Research Center survey this year.

Republicans were split more or less equally, with 48 percent supporting marijuana legalization idea and 49 percent opposing. The blog reports that many legislators from both parties have privately supported pot legalization but feared a political backlash. “If this poll is accurate, those fears were unwarranted,” says the blog’s Scott Henson.

The legislation marks a major change for Republicans, who long hve embraced a law-and-order rallying cry. Now many GOP senators argue for rehabilitating more offenders rather than long-time incarceration.

An Arizona doctor argues that the government should have learned from previous federal anti-drug strategies that blanket prohibition doesn’t work. He calls for scrapping attempts to curtail opioids and replacing it with “harm reduction” policies.

Expensive medications for inmates can lead to substandard care and delays in treatment, and that may have lasting—even deadly—consequences for incarcerated individuals, writes a prison health care advocate.

Murder rates in the nation’s 30 largest cities are projected to fall by nearly 6 percent this year according to the latest data, undercutting claims that the nation is experiencing a “crime wave,” says the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.

School safety commission proposes ending a federal guideline telling schools not to punish minorities at higher rates. The panel largely sidestepped issues relating to guns, although it favors arming some school personnel.